What a blast from the past! On April 1 (quite coincidentally) I came across the following newspaper clipping from 1974:
Several weeks before this article appeared I had received a telephone inquiry at my office asking if I was interested in a consulting engagement. The caller was rather evasive, but I surmised that the project somehow involved automobiles, electricity, and wind turbines. Since I had recently completed an independent study project at The University of Oklahoma on wind turbines for electric power generation I naturally assumed that's where the caller had gotten my name. I was always looking for new work and was interested enough to agree to meet with him. I later found out that my assumption had been incorrect; the caller had just blindly picked me out of the "Engineers" section of the phone book yellow pages.
I attended a meeting of project participants, who struck me as a motley collection of car guys and dreamers ... including a used car salesman, a competent machinist/inventor, and one very naive mechanical engineer. I learned that the project was to be a windmill-powered electric car, pretty much as described in the article above, and the guy behind the idea was named Rex Curtis. I immediately realized that the idea was not feasible for a whole variety of reasons, some technical and some non-technical, but I agreed to prepare a feasibility report and present it at the next meeting.
At the next meeting I presented a five-page report detailing both the technical and the practical reasons
why the idea wouldn't work. After presenting my report I announced that I would not participate any further in the project. Curtis, who seemed like an amiable and earnest but naive stumblebum, was hardly deterred, but some of the other guys took notice. Before the meeting was over, however, I was surprised to overhear Curtis telling another attendee that he expected a major portion of the financing for the project to come from one or more elderly widows he had met at an Arthur Murray Dance Studio event the previous weekend. To me, this confirmed the wisdom of my quick resignation from the project.
Less than two weeks later the newspaper article appeared, including the use of my name without permission and misrepresenting my participation in the project. Apparently influenced by my report that a reasonably-sized windmill alone could never capture enough energy to power the car, Curtis seemed to have added a "chain saw" powered auxiliary generator to his design concept. (Did this make it one of the first hybrids?) Almost immediately I began receiving calls and letters at my office wanting to know more about the miraculous windmill-powered electric car. I even got a call from BBC in London wanting to do a radio interview with me. I declined all requests, simply (and ethically) stating that I was no longer associated with the project.
Fast forward about 18 months. The last I ever heard about the windmill-powered car project was a telephone call I received one day from someone who identified himself as Court Clerk for one of the local U.S. District Court judges. He said he was preparing a pre-sentencing report on Mr. Curtis and, among other things, he wanted to know if I had invested any money in the project. He went on to say, "Mr. Curtis has been here before, and Judge XXX is bothered that he can't seem to convince Mr. Curtis that he can't use the U.S. Mail to defraud people." I recited pretty much what I've written above, and that was the end of that. This remains the wackiest consulting engagement I ever encountered in 40 years of running my own businesses.
proff, this one's for you!
[This message has been edited by Marvin McInnis (edited 05-08-2012).]
